Let's be smart, and even if you don't have that, if you're staying at home and you want
to drink cleaner water, then put this under your tap, and then at least you know that
you're drinking clean water.
All right, Gary.
Thank you so much.
All the best.
All right.
That's Gary Null, The Gary Null Show, here on WBAI.
Again, the show airs Monday through Friday at 12 noon.
One more time, 516-620-3602.
Alexa, what is net neutrality?
Net neutrality is the principle that all governmental organizations and internet service providers
should treat all data on the internet equally regardless of user, content, or source, without
blocking or reducing access to unfavorable information or providing preferential treatment
to users or sources who meet certain criteria.
All right, Gary Null, The Gary Null Show, here on WBAI.
And it's a very, very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening, joined tonight by Kyle.
Hi.
And Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
And we are celebrating, I guess.
Thank you, Alexa, for helping us out there.
We started a minute early, actually, because we're so festive right now.
Net neutrality, not dead yet.
Today, there was a vote in the U.S. Senate, and the vote went 52 to 47 in favor of a resolution
of disapproval.
I love those.
Resolution of disapproval that would overturn the FCC's approval of net neutrality.
So, we are celebrating, I guess.
Thank you, Alexa, for helping us out there.
We started a minute early, actually, because we're so festive right now.
Net neutrality, not dead yet.
Today, there was a vote in the U.S. Senate, and the vote went 52 to 47 in favor of a resolution
of disapproval.
I love those.
There was a vote in the U.S. Senate, and the vote went 52 to 47 in favor of a resolution
of disapproval.
I love those.
This is the final rush, and they're going to bring us down to defeat.
I heard Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and, oh, my God, all these people that are going to
sink us.
But then we hit 50, and then we hit 51, and once you hit 51, there's nothing Pence can
do except throw a temper tantrum.
It's a sound rebuke, I think, also of Chairman Pai.
Get used to it.
There's going to be many sound rebukes.
I am looking forward to it.
And again, as we've seen so many times before, this is not the end of any fight.
This just means we're kind of maintaining at this point, but it's still very important.
Contact your Congress creatures, contact those in power, and let them know what you think
about net neutrality, because that's really the only way we have to affect this whole
mess and keep us above water.
Larry.
Larry.
Larry.
Larry.
Larry.
Larry.
Larry.
Yeah, that's right.
I did it.
Larry.
I'm playing this.
Larry.
Okay.
Larry.
Rob, tell me what you hear.
What word do you hear?
Larry.
Larry.
Just say it.
Let's see.
It sounds a bit like Laurel to me.
You're hearing Laurel?
I'm hearing Laurel.
Really?
Yes.
Wow.
You're hearing Laurel.
That's incredible.
I'm hearing the word icebox.
Everyone is saying that they're either hearing Laurel or Yanny.
You just said Laurel.
Kyle, how about you?
What are you hearing?
Laurel.
You're hearing Laurel too?
I'm hearing Laurel as well.
I'll admit it.
I don't understand.
Who's hearing Yanny?
Larry.
Larry.
Is there anybody out there hearing Yanny?
Larry.
Larry.
Larry.
This comes from a Reddit post that somebody made.
I don't know how this all got started, but I think what they did was they looked up the
word Laurel on a dictionary, dictionary.com, played it, and somebody happened to be wandering
by and said, hey, that said Yanny.
That didn't say Laurel.
And a whole big discussion got started.
Apparently, people who hear higher frequencies, I guess, namely very young people, hear Yanny
instead.
But honestly, I can't see it, and I certainly can't hear it.
The funny thing is, when you turn it down, I can start to hear it as Yanny.
And the whole thing about this is that everyone's frequency response, not only in their ears,
but in whatever you're listening on, whether it be headphones, earbuds, the crappy speaker
on your cell phone, whatever, it's all a factor in exactly how you hear this and which chunk
of the spectrum you're doing best in.
So it might sound like Laurel.
It might sound like Yanny.
But I think both answers are right, unless you're asking, what's the name of that progressive
musician from Greece?
I just listened to you in very low volume, and it sounded like you were extolling the
virtuals of Donald Trump.
That was weird.
Wow.
I'm sorry.
I thought this was that show.
Yeah.
I think this is sort of a way that compression sort of has artifacts in it.
And then, as Rob said, the playback method impacts what parts of that you're hearing.
And if you know anything about MP3, the sort of variable bitrate things, sometimes you
can hear artifacts in recordings like that.
And I'm wondering if that's part of it, if this was on Wikipedia as an Ogvorbis or something,
and someone had, as you said, the right combination of equipment that made those edges of the
frequencies more noticeable?
Well, on Reddit, the original is MP4.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
So if you download that, that's what you get.
I don't know if you play it through all kinds of crappy speakers.
Who knows what it might sound like?
I'm playing it as low as possible now, and I'm still not hearing any Yanny.
Not that I even know what a Yanny is.
But I guess there's people out there that do.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com, if you're hearing anything other than the word Laurel.
I'd like to know.
I'd really like to know about this.
In fact, you can even tweet us, Hacker Radio Show, on Twitter.
And maybe we'll even see that before the show ends.
But boy, isn't this an amazing time to be alive?
These are the kinds of debates that we have.
Yeah.
All I know is the dress was blue and black.
Yeah, let's not get that debate started all over again.
That really divided the country.
And we don't need that.
We need to unite.
We don't need to have any more of these disagreements.
Yeah, that's what people are talking about today.
Laurel.
Laurel.
Okay.
We're going to have that playing throughout the entire hour, but we're not going to listen
to it for the entire hour.
Maybe we'll hear something different.
We are still in the middle of a fundraiser.
I want to thank all the people who called in.
I want to thank the BAI buddies.
Yes, we got BAI buddies.
We were heralded for this, congratulated, carried on people's shoulders as we came in
today.
We had a response from listeners who pledged to be BAI buddies.
You too can become a BAI buddy.
How do you do that?
You can go to give2wbai.org, give to the number 2, wbai.org, and instructions are there.
You can also give a call to 516-620-3602 and say, hey, I want to be a WBAI buddy.
Or maybe it's just BAI buddy.
I'm not sure.
You got to get it just right.
I think it's BAI buddy.
But they might know what you're talking about if you say WBAI buddy.
Yeah.
I think technically it's BAI buddy.
Is it?
Okay.
Yeah.
That's what I was, yeah.
Well, some people say BAI and it sounds like WBAI to certain ears.
Yeah, you can drop the W.
Yeah.
See, it sounded to me like you said something completely different just now.
Wow.
Okay.
I need better headphones.
That's what I need.
So you can basically specify the amount that you would like to pay every month.
It can be something like $5.
It can be something like $50.
Depends on what kind of mood you're in and how much money you have.
And all of that goes to help this radio station, which improves by the day.
And I'm not kidding because we are starting to build this place up finally and get things
going.
And it's always a good thing when that happens.
And that's going to be reflected in our programming.
That'll be reflected in the things you hear over WBAI and our strength going forward.
A year ago, it seemed pretty dire.
Ten years ago, it seemed pretty dire too.
It seems dire every now and then.
But somehow, somehow, just like net neutrality, we always seem to survive.
And we intend to get through all the challenges that we have been through so far, we're still
struggling with.
And the ones that come in the future, I'm sure there'll be many.
Since 1960, when this radio station came on the air, we've been doing that with the help
of our listeners.
First radio station actually to actually have listener support.
So you can blame it all on us.
Every station that begs for money got the idea from WBAI, 516-620-3602.
We have some premiums that we're going to let people know about.
We basically, I know a couple of weeks ago when we were on last, there were some issues
with people trying to pledge for a certain item that because of a technical issue was
listed as not available when it actually was.
And I'm referring to the lifetime subscription, the Hacker Digest lifetime subscription.
So if you were trying to get that two weeks ago, only to bang your head against the wall
out of frustration because you were told that it didn't exist when we were saying on the
radio that it did, well, you can call now and it's definitely available, at least for
a while until a bunch of people call.
516-620-3602, a pledge of $100 gets you the Hacker Digest lifetime subscription.
And what the Hacker Digest is, is basically a collection, a compilation of every 2600
magazine that has come out in a particular year, starting in 1984.
1984 is volume one, 1985 is volume two.
We are, last year was volume 34.
So that's how it works.
Every year you will get, via email, a link or an attachment with the entire years of publication of 2600 in PDF format.
No DRM, no copy control.
It's yours to do with as you wish.
And the history that you will bear witness to by reading through these pages is fascinating.
And I'm not just making this up, because I actually have to go through all of this
every single quarter when we put out another digest from years past.
We're up to volume 19 now, I think, from 2002.
And what that involves, involves going through all the issues, reading the letters, reading
the editorials, saying, oh, wow, that's what we were talking about then.
This is what articles were in the magazine at this particular point, this is the technology
as it evolved at that particular moment in history.
And it's fascinating, just reading through all of this, you realize how much what we
do, all of us, not just us on the radio, all of us, the community, how much it matters,
how much it did matter, how much it shaped where we are today.
To see the early days of Google, to see what phone freaks of the past were doing with the
phone network, to see the first personal computers, to watch the evolution of privacy
and the Internet, and governmental control, and all sorts of—everything we're talking
about now.
In 1984, we were talking about the NSA, when nobody else was.
It's fascinating to go through this.
You're getting a lifetime, because you will continue getting this as long as 2600 exists,
you're getting a lifetime of news about the hacker community, technology, the Internet
revolution, the development of the personal computer, the changing of the phone network.
So many things have happened since 1984, so many things are continuing to happen.
And this is all yours for a pledge of only $100, which you can make at 516-620-3602,
ask for the Hacker Digest lifetime subscription, or you can go to give2wbai.org and look for
that, and hopefully they're still available.
We should point out that there are only a certain amount of these available for claiming,
so if you want to get one, if you're thinking you might want to get one, you want to make
that decision as soon as you can, call 516-620-3602.
And if this doesn't interest you, or if you don't want to donate $100, any amount helps.
You can be a BAI buddy and decide exactly how much money you're going to automatically
donate every month, or you could just make any one-time donation you want.
No, if you're not interested, I've got something else for you.
If you're not interested in that, okay, fine, no problem, no problem, we have other things.
But what Rob says is true, and as we demonstrated two weeks ago, inadvertently, yeah, these
things do run out, and when people come up against that, they're very disappointed.
And we got lots of email from people who were extremely disappointed and kind of angry,
actually.
But if you call now, you will be able to obtain this item and donate $100 to the radio station.
Everybody wins and becomes more educated as a result.
But we also have the HOPE Conference Keynote Series.
We have a few flash drives left and a bunch of DVDs.
So basically you make your choice, a $75 pledge, ask for the HOPE Conference Keynote Series
either flash drive or the HOPE Conference Keynote Series DVD.
Of course, it's more than one DVD, it's a whole bunch.
It's every single keynote address that was given at every single HOPE Conference.
And up to now, there have been 11.
There's going to be a 12th one in July.
Obviously, we don't have that one yet.
But for all the ones that have happened over the past, how many years has that been now?
1994 was the first one, so 24 years.
You will see in living color all kinds of addresses that were given to the hacker community,
people like Steve Wozniak, people like Kevin Mitnick, or Jello Biafra.
Well, my living eye, now there's so many people, none of us can think of who our keynote speakers are.
And much like with the Hacker Digest, this is a romp through history.
If you look at the older conferences and see what people were talking about, what the keynotes
were talking about, what technical stuff was going on, what societal stuff was going on,
it's really fascinating to learn where we've been, where we're going, and why.
And this is how you can do it.
Richard Stallman.
There's another one.
He gave a keynote address.
Aaron McGruder.
Aaron McGruder, thank you.
I'm sorry.
I'm drawing a blank here.
That always happens to me.
Whenever I take a test, I can never remember.
But every single keynote address, some conferences had more than one, so you're getting more
than 11 talks.
You're getting a whole bunch of them on either DVD or flash drive.
And much like the Digest, they're very enlightening.
They reflect the changing times, they reflect things that are similar today.
Cory Doctorow.
In fact, okay, Cory Doctorow gave the keynote address last time at HULP number 11.
I'm sorry, the 11th HULP.
What am I talking about?
The 11th HULP, Cory Doctorow was our keynote speaker.
If none of this interests you, we have but one.
We have one Cory Doctorow autographed book left in our stash here.
So if you want to pledge $75, then simply call.
I would do that now.
Call 516-620-3602 or go to givetowbai.org, pledge $75, and ask for Walk Away, Cory Doctorow's
autographed book.
Yes, it's autographed.
So that's all you have to do is give a call.
There's only one of those left, though, so I figured I'd mention that as going through
what we have.
It's a novel.
It is a novel.
And you read it, too.
I read it.
You read it on a train in Eastern Europe.
Yes, I read it.
In fact, this is a funny story, a funny story.
We were on that train in Eastern Europe, right?
And we texted Cory and said, hey, your book is great on a train in Eastern Europe.
And he was very happy to hear that.
Yes.
We text him and...
Sorry.
You won't hear sounds like that when we get our soundproofing studio.
Yeah, they're moving.
I just would say they're moving furniture.
So there is...
Sounds like they're throwing furniture.
There's activity going on in the station.
But no, it was a novel.
And I enjoyed myself reading it.
Just if you want to know, it's about, I would say, future, present, where people build a
lot of things and rebuild them and start over.
And there's a sort of authoritarian state and other...
It's about us, then.
Interesting thematic elements.
Yeah, there are hackers, I believe, in this book.
And all of these items, I think, give great context, both the keynotes and the digest,
as well as this novel you've just mentioned.
Great context in the imaginative sense, but also historical sense.
So that's something really important I wanted to express.
Yeah.
And just about the noise.
I want to point out that there is work being done on this building in which we're in, which
is long delayed, which we can finally get to because of the support of listeners just
like you who called 516-620-3602 or went to give2wbai.org and threw in whatever they
could to help us keep doing what we do here.
And this is the only thing that has kept this place going since 1960.
58 years of just this.
We're not out there selling bake sales or anything.
We're not out there telling you what kind of soda to...
That sounds like a great idea, actually.
We actually could.
We could clean up.
The Girl Scouts really make a lot of money with that.
But one thing we don't sell on this station is influence, is airtime, is what we're doing
now, which is putting sound into your ear things.
Because that is what we're here for at WBAI, is to just give you the work that we're doing,
pure, unaffected, unrestricted by any sort of sponsorships or business relationships
or entanglements like that, which are not good for radio.
And just to be clear, WBAI has been our home for quite some time, and it has been very
supportive of Off The Hook and the work that we do.
We're simply sharing the good that has come of it and expressing to you that you too can
be a part of that.
You can contribute.
You can help make programs like this, but also make WBAI flourish and be the pillar
that it will continue to be in the future.
There's really exciting possibilities and a lot of changes ahead, and we want you to
join in and be a part of that.
And that's the kind of great experience that we get to participate in, in a project like
this, a community radio station, such a unique thing in a wonderful city such as this.
So it really is a treasure, and I encourage anyone out there who hasn't, maybe you've
never donated before, please join us.
Become a BAI buddy.
Any level of contribution really helps.
The BAI buddy thing makes it a lot easier and something that you won't forget.
It'll be continuous and automatic, but again, any rate, whatever amount, it really goes
a long way.
Absolutely.
And that number again, 516-620-3602.
For any people who are calling in and voice your support for Off The Hook, for WBAI, also
you can go to give2wbai.org and donate in that manner, and keep this radio station going
because it really is filled with all kinds of interesting material that you'll hear throughout
the course of any day, throughout the course of a week, and certainly by listening to the
archive that we keep maintained on our site, 2600.com.com.com, you can hear all the things
we've been through.
The archive is very enlightening as far as what we've been through historically and where
we're going.
Yeah.
As I said, it's so important for context.
It's incredible.
You'll hear things repeating, subtle changes, but similar themes.
It's an incredible thing to go back and do.
I encourage people to do that.
It is really fascinating.
Speaking of things repeating, we still have this going.
Yanni?
Is that you?
No.
Will, is anybody here Yanni?
Because I don't.
I really, I'm trying to.
I'd like to.
He's live at the Acropolis if you want to hear him.
Laurel.
No.
Laurel.
Okay.
You can't influence me like that.
Laurel.
No.
Laurel.
No.
Stop it.
Don't interfere with the recording here.
Laurel.
It's important.
Laurel.
All right.
Well, maybe someday I'll hear it.
Maybe he'd like to take a break and just check out some vintage comedy by that famous team,
Yanni and Hardy.
Oh, that's good.
I like that.
Yes.
What's this about Google employees resigning in protest against a Pentagon contract?
What is going on here?
Have you heard about this?
No, I haven't heard about that.
I'm holding the story in my hands.
Someone just handed it to me.
Wow.
Project Maven?
What is this?
We want to automate the ability.
We're going to have an algorithm decide who dies and who lives in the battlefield.
It sounds great.
It's simple.
Wait, wait, wait.
That's great.
No.
Okay.
I know this was announced three months ago that Google was teaming up with a controversial
military pilot program known as Project Maven.
Their goal is to speed up analysis of drone footage by automatically classifying images
of objects and people.
What is this?
Who gets to live and who gets to die?
How does this work?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Google's new, their new motto is don't be evil unless it's for the military and you're
going to make it safer for them to kill people.
Okay.
Oh, wow.
But that's the sort of characterization.
They fit that on a wall.
They are contributing or they've been vying to contribute to this other thing called JEDI,
the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Campaign.
So they really want to be a part of some DOD stuff as far as updating their infrastructure.
And that is one thing.
Of course, the acronym is JEDI.
But this other thing was sort of an entry into that from what I read.
And it is essentially, Project Maven is this way of analyzing video feeds, you know, obvious
stuff from autonomous UAVs, drones, in other words.
And the idea is that corporations that specialize in this, such as Google, that have experience
with data, large, large amounts of it, machine learning, image search, all of those kinds
of whiz-bang things that maybe the military hasn't excelled at because they're out like,
you know, making bullets and oiling guns or whatever they do.
Because of that, they want some of that outside expertise.
And so Google happily, which is unusual, happily signed up, perhaps because of this other joint
infrastructure thing.
But specifically on this, to share some of their sort of brainpower in, I guess, a ham-fisted
sort of duty to the United States military.
And a lot of the employees are taking issue.
They're saying, yeah, I don't want to be a part of that.
And for many of them, it means, I don't want to work here anymore.
I can't encourage people to work here.
That was a couple of the quotations I saw.
It's really an interesting shift for Google, too, because I think everyone in the infosec,
computer security hacker world knows someone who works at Google.
There are so many people there, so many people of good conscience there.
And Google, the scuttlebutt has often been that they've always welcomed employee criticism,
questioning of their decisions, you know, input on the directions they're taking with
things.
But with this particular issue, it looks like employees were finding themselves not heard
when they protested this.
So the only out they had was to leave.
Well, the employees resigning in protest say executives have become less transparent with
their workforce by controversial business decisions, seem less interested in listening
to workers' objections than they once did.
And in the case of Maven, Google is helping the Defense Department implement machine learning
to classify images gathered by drones, as we've said.
Some employees believe humans, not algorithms, should be responsible for this sensitive and
potentially lethal work.
And that Google shouldn't be involved in military work at all.
And historically, Google has promoted an open culture that encourages employees to challenge
and debate product decisions.
But some employees feel that their leadership no longer as—is no longer as attentive to
their concerns, leaving them to face the fallout.
One employee said, over the last couple of months, I've been less and less impressed
with the response and the way people's concerns are being treated and listened to.
I realized, if I can't recommend people join here, then why am I still here?
That's a very good question.
I think many of us should ask every day at our place of employment.
I don't know.
People were worried that Google was turning to—turning into Skynet from Terminator,
but now it looks like it's Whopper from War Games.
Well, in addition to the resignation—resignations, nearly 4,000 Google employees have voiced
their opposition to Project Maven in an internal petition that asked Google to immediately
cancel the contract and institute policy against taking on future military work.
The mounting pressure from employees, however, seems to have done little to sway Google's
decision.
The company has defended its work on Maven and is thought to be one of the lead contenders
for another major Pentagon cloud computing contract, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure,
better known as JEDI, that is currently up for bids.
I don't even want to know what that's all about, but it's probably evil as well.
I didn't quite get to that, but, yeah, it's—I've seen this in companies.
I think that this has maybe been a little slower for Google, but when management sort
of churns a bit, you start having a lot of other people move in, and I guess the ethos
just—it vacillates a little bit in some of these moments.
And I think that may be going in one very odd direction at Google, and it's jarring
for some of the, I think, devotees that are employed there.
And I really got to take my hat off to the people who are brave enough to stick to their
convictions enough to leave what's probably a very, very good job on the basis of something
like this.
And the people who do that sort of thing and the people who are whistleblowers about these
sorts of things and stuff, that's a special kind of bravery.
It really is.
You can't go to the cafeteria anymore.
You can't make use of that gym and all the benefits.
If you give birth to a child and, you know, all kinds of really cool things that happen
at Google, you're giving it all up by saying that you have a conscience and you don't want
them to be doing this kind of crap.
I think that says a lot about who you are.
In fact, put that on a resume, that you resign Google in protest of their actions.
And Google, now you have us to deal with.
You have all the people that don't work for Google that use Google, that are your product,
so it were, because we're the eyes that you're always trying to get the attention of.
And if you annoy us too much, you'll become irrelevant.
So listen to those people with a conscience, because they are valuable.
You should not let them go.
It's important to note, one of the sort of explanations of this, as I said when we first
discussed this, is the safety factor, that they're actually, they're making these things
more reliable for warfighters and that, you know, we should be heartened, we should be
encouraged that Google is going to make the battlefield a more accurate and, you know,
I guess moral place or something, which is complete balderdash.
Look at autonomous vehicles.
How many of these autonomous systems have been killing people in the last couple weeks,
in the last like couple months alone, okay?
These are the kinds of algorithms that are still being, I think, developed.
And to trust this in the context of a battlefield where your country, your national, I think,
your prestige, your reputation is being entrusted to something that is newly developed and potentially
flawed, I think is very dangerous and kind of just goes to show that this do-gooding
that they're doing for the military, it just, it seems a little thin.
Yeah, but you know, there is one problem I have with that analogy.
When the cars crash on autonomous systems, they're not supposed to.
They're not supposed to do that.
Whereas a system like Project Maven, if, you know, if somebody is killed by a drone,
they do mean to do that.
That is the goal, to do accurate targeting and horrible things like that.
And that's something that it scares the crap out of me to think that this is where we're
going.
To see scenes like we saw in Gaza on Monday where automated drones are dropping deadly
tear gas on people, we're going to see more things like that.
And if Google is leading the charge, they're going to be good.
They're going to be accurate.
They're going to be extremely, extremely advanced technology.
And that's what I think these people have a problem with, is just realizing that we're
building killing machines, not search engines.
And we also have to consider when the technology doesn't work as intended, because what if
it pops up the wrong person as whatever target they are, and then someone innocent is killed
or someone they weren't even aiming for is killed as a result of this.
And I think the grander issue for a lot of people is just what kind of corporation am
I working for here?
It may have been specious, may have been unknown, and there may have been parts of Google that
maybe people didn't necessarily feel a certain allegiance to, but overall they could say
they're proud to work there.
I think this changes it for a lot of people fundamentally.
And if all of that doesn't get your attention, how about this?
What if a hacker gets into it?
Yeah.
That's always going to be something that people are afraid of.
A hacker could get into this system and make it go haywire, so you better be careful what
you develop.
But it's true also that there may be more people on the outside that understand these
better.
There may be more hackers as a result of this sort of ethical choice that the company's
making because the result is people leaving.
You get a small brain drain, maybe a big brain drain, but you end up having more people on
the outside that understand the systems they're designing.
And that actually then makes the military's choice of contracting and working with them
actually weaker because you don't have the smartest and the brightest there.
So it's going to be very interesting to follow, I think.
And I think a lot of people are maybe reassessing how they look at this company and wondering
when one of the letters in Google is going to be maybe camo colored or something.
Wow.
All right.
Thank you to follow.
I'm glad we're having the conversation, and I really respect the people who have resigned
as a result of this because they've helped spread that information, that word of what's
going on.
Hopefully this is a continuing conversation that results in something good.
Hey, speaking of things that are good, you know what's happening this weekend?
You don't, do you?
Wow.
The Vintage Computer Festival East.
Yeah, the Vintage Computer Festival.
We've been there, Kyle.
Yes.
It's at the Marconi Museum.
I believe they have the big antenna there.
The InfoAge Science Center on Marconi Road.
On Marconi Road.
Yes.
And that's happening this weekend, sponsored by the Vintage Computer Festival people.
Remember that guy, Evan Koblenz, that we've talked to on occasion?
He's a great guy.
He really is.
I know him.
He knows his stuff.
And he's with us now on the phone.
Evan, are you there?
Hello.
Hi.
Thank you for the generous introduction.
Well, you certainly deserve it.
Tell us something about the Vintage Computer Festival.
The best way I can explain it is it's a lot like an antique car show, except that at an
old car show, you can't touch anything and you sure can't drive.
Imagine if there was a rule saying everyone had to toss you the keys to get you for a
ride.
Wow.
That's what a Vintage Computer Festival is like.
That's what it's like.
A three-day event.
Friday is all technical classes and a lunchtime keynote about how we restored our UNIVAC mainframe.
Saturday and Sunday is keynotes each morning.
And then the exhibit halls, consignment, vendors, classes, food, prizes, et cetera,
all day.
It's a family-friendly event.
It's truly a festival of computer history, and it all benefits the Vintage Computer Federation,
which is a 501c3 nonprofit.
I remember in my early days at the State University at Stony Brook, the only computer on campus
was a UNIVAC.
And I didn't take any computer courses.
I was an English major, so I had no idea.
I would see the printouts and it just looked so hostile.
All caps and complete technical jargon.
Is that the kind of UNIVAC you have?
The one we have is a Sperry-Rand transistor error system, say mid to late 60s.
It's called a 1219B as in Bully.
It's a military version of a 418-2, came off a Navy ship, and it's designed for basically
fire control.
Of course, it's a general-purpose computer.
But the function of this one was re-RN and shoot something out.
Not quite as accurate as we were talking about a moment ago.
Anyway, there's only a few left in existence.
We have two of them, one for parts and one for display.
And we've actually got it mostly running.
So we're very excited about this, and maybe we'll hook it up to a Nerf gun or something
one day for laughs.
But we're going to have the people who restored it for us, our own members, give a talk Friday
about what they did.
And I'll tell you one little sneak preview story, which is very funny.
On the ships, of course, they did some very serious work, depending on the country.
And we found this one tape unlabeled.
UNIVAC did provide an assembler.
So we loaded up the tape, expecting to find diagnostic data or just sort of scratch data.
And we found Hunt the Wumpus.
Oh, wow.
I was good at that.
Famous text editor game.
So these guys, they were Navy officers, but they were computer geeks first in their spare
time and they Hunt the Wumpus on the UNIVAC.
Wow.
And I think Eliza was on the UNIVAC too, right?
I'm sure.
I'm sure it probably exists.
But we're now able to fire up the teletype, the interface of this thing, get the tape
drive running, CPU running.
It weighs several tons.
We move it on forklift pallets.
And is the rumor true that when you turn it on, the lights in the entire town dim?
So that is an urban legend going back to the days of ENIAC and World War II.
And that was debunked, but it was an urban legend.
We have three-phase power going into a 400-hertz motor generator to power this thing.
That's what I was...
My next question I was going to ask, what kind of a tie-in or a power supply does it
take to get this thing whirring?
Right.
So all the ships was 400 hertz.
So we have three-phase in, spins it up or down or whatever to 400 hertz and into the
system.
Got it.
Now, just to give a sense to people listening, what kind of computing power are we talking
about with this massive machine?
Oh, man.
You would need thousands of these to go anywhere near what's in your iPhone.
One bit of mathematical context I can give you, the Tate drives, the Tate drives is approximately
a hundred pounds per megabyte.
Wow.
That is something.
That is not...
You know, if you don't know why somebody is inspired to make something like this work,
and as Evan said, you would need hundreds, thousands of these massive computers just
to equal what you have in your iPhone, then, yeah, you know, I think you should go to the
Vintage Computer Festival because you'll catch the bug then.
You'll figure out why this is something that impassions so many people just to get something
from the past up and running again to see the early days of computing.
That's how you got involved, right, Evan?
Right.
Yeah.
CPU weighs a ton.
The show is everything from basically 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, so whether you grew up,
like I did, with an Apple II in the 80s, or if you're an Altair, you know, homebrew guy
from the 70s, if you're a PDT person from the 60s, punch cards, et cetera, something
for everyone.
But, yeah, I got involved by accident.
I grew up in the 80s with Atari and Apple and Commodore and everything else, and I was
writing a book about the history of mobile computing called Abacus to Smartphone, and
as a subset of researching that book back, you know, five, ten years ago, I started collecting
palm tops and handheld computers in the 80s, and I quickly realized it was just a big hobby
out there.
What's funny is, for every one person who's an active collector, there are ten more who
are passive accumulators, and they're part of our world, too, just, you know, because
they have to be.
So, some of us are active collectors, some of us just never got rid of stuff in the first
place, but we're all happy retrocomputing nerds.
It's interesting, because that equation, I think, follows through with anything.
If you're looking at old films, for everybody who collects them, there are ten people who
have old films in their garage that are extremely valuable to people who are looking for them.
Right.
And what's kind of funny is, adjacent to us, we're at this place called the InfoWage Science
Center, as you mentioned, a former Marconi facility, and there's about a dozen or so
independent organizations that are all tenants here.
There's our organization, there's a radio and TV museum, a Shrevec Museum, a Mountain
Trade Museum, a Makerspace, etc., etc.
And the radio museum, we have a bit of a friendly rivalry with them, because their demographic
is basically nerdy guys 65 to 85, we're basically nerdy guys 45 to 65.
And they say, you know, computers, they're too new, we're like radios, who cares about
radios?
So it's a funny little rivalry there.
We also have Vintage Computer Festival West at the Computer History Museum in Silicon
Valley in August.
We have Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest at the Living Computer Museum in
February, and on and on, where we keep expanding the franchise.
Hey, Evan, I just wanted to know, speaking of collectors and so on, is there a swap function
there?
Say I have some hardware I wanted to put in my truck, or I was looking for a specific
thing, are people trading stuff at this event?
It's not a free swap, but we do have a large consignment booth, where you bring in your
items, you fill out a form, tag it, we have a very small modest fee, and you go enjoy
the show.
And at the end of the show, you come, either get your check or whatever you didn't sell,
and we handle it for you.
That's great.
That sounds great.
And of course, many, many other enthusiasts there that you could always talk to and get
some advice on other shows.
Right.
There will be some professional vendors there, but it's not a free or a swap.
Absolutely.
Okay.
The heart of it is an exhibition.
So now, Evan, the Vintage Computer Festival East, and we'll get into the other chapters
in a moment.
That's taking place this weekend, as you mentioned, Friday, our classes, Saturday and Sunday,
the main event, where it's at a place called Wall, New Jersey?
Yep.
It's five minutes down the road from the legendary Asbury Park, about an hour drive south of
the city.
Some people say, why don't we just do it in the city, and the answer is cost.
We have a very low-cost facility here, a former Army base, pretty awesome, an attraction of
all the museums.
And you have lots of space, too.
You have a good amount of space to have all your hardware.
Yep.
We have the whole former Army base, so it's pretty awesome.
You guys have been here.
So Evan, for those of us who can't make it to the event, what's a good way to start getting
involved in this whole retrocomputing scene and start learning about it?
Sure.
Well, first of all, we're going to record all the talks, and we're not going to stream
them.
We'll record them and post them as soon as we can.
On our website, which is vcfed.org, you can click forum, and on the forum, it's the largest
discussion site in the hobby.
Wow.
Now, can you tell us something about some of the other machines that you have in your
complex?
Because I know when Kyle and I were down there a few years ago, we just wound up spending
all this time looking at machines that either we were familiar with or we'd never seen before,
and it's amazing to see them working, to see the responses that you get from them,
and also to see what they look like, maybe for the first time.
Well, the computer museum we have here, our national headquarters, is open year-round,
and that is now twice the size of when you were last here.
Oh, boy.
Just I'll point out a couple highlights.
We have this one computer we affectionately call George, and by the way, everything is
donated to us.
We don't purchase artifacts.
We do all the restoration ourselves.
George is an analog computer built in 1958 by the George Philbert Company as a one-off
custom machine for the MIT Mechanical Engineering Lab, used at MIT in 1970.
It was sold to an alumni of Duke-Dubonis Decommissioning, and 45 years later, a few years ago, the guy's
wife said, get this censored out of the garage, so he called the MIT Museum, wouldn't you
like your analog computer back for Raxworth?
And they said, call those guys in Jersey, so now it's ours.
We have every 8-bit micro you could fathom, even some exotics, like an Apple 1, a NexCube,
Lisas, Alpers, etc.
We have a vast collection of minicomputers, IBM, DEC, General, Wang, Prime, Burroughs.
We have a Bendix Vacuum II computer from 1956.
You know, we have a library of software, of course, so a pretty thorough collection.
We have the Cray supercomputer, which is a fun toy.
A fun toy.
That's what it's been reduced to now.
I remember when that thing was the end-all of all possible computers, and now it's a
fun toy.
We have an entry-level baby Cray, so it's only about 800 pounds, only two racks, from
the 90s.
But one of the newest things we have, and you know, when someone gives you a Cray supercomputer,
you figure out what to do with it later.
You know, one of the jokes we make to our visitors is we can play 800 instances of Pac-Man
at once, or one instance of Pac-Man really fast.
Hey, Evan, are there any machines or types of machines that elude the museum, or that
you've yet to see at this event?
Oh, man.
Well, we haven't had an IBM 360.
A lot of visitors say, where's your 360?
We put our heads down, we're ashamed we don't have a 360.
Right, right.
We have an 1130, which could be a surprise.
Let's see.
So if a listener out there has a 360, they should get in touch with you, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
We've had a surprisingly impressive amount of DEC PDP-8s.
We've had MOOC.
Last year, we had two Apple Ones here.
There's not much that eludes us.
Yeah, it sounds really comprehensive.
Do you have a PDP-10?
We do not have a PDP-10.
Because that's the first computer I ever used was a PDP-10.
We have a couple PDP-8s, the original straight-8, which is rare at St. Steve's, several 11s
and VAXs, but we don't have any of the other numerical machines, the 10s, 7s, etc.
The only place we do have those is, of course, the Computer Museum in California and the
Olympic Computer Museum in Seattle, which are wonderful partners of ours.
Now with something like the ancient UNIVACs or even something like the PDPs, what do you
actually run on these for demonstration purposes, just to show people putting them through their
paces because you can't exactly run Doom on the things?
Well, we were able to hunt the wampus on a UNIVAC.
On the PDPs, right now we're at the stage where it's look at boots.
The PDP-8, for example, we do a front paddle program to make the lights go back and forth
as if it's a Knight Rider or a kit.
Pretty soon, for example, the straight-8 that we have, the straight-8 means the original
1965 PDP-8, the core memory and TTL version, only 1,500 ever made, less than 50 exist enrolled.
But what we have was donated by deck when it was new to a high school computer club
in a Princeton, New Jersey area only about an hour from us.
So we're very happy to have that one because it's got local provenance.
And what the kids, now baby boomers, did with that one was they ran a language called Focal
on it, which is an early basic-like language in the 60s and 70s.
So our plan, once we get the ASR-33 hooked up to it, is to do the same thing and show
people how this particular one was used here in Central Jersey to teach high school kids
basic programming content.
I miss basic.
I really do.
I try to explain it to people.
It's really hard to get a basic emulator going these days.
Actually, there's a basic emulator for Android, so it should be pretty straightforward.
All right.
Well, it's just, you know, everything these days is ready-made and very few down-to-earth
programming.
Certainly, assembly language programming isn't what it used to be.
But regardless, so you have all these machines, all these incredible examples of technology
as it developed.
I'm wondering, do you have many foreign computers?
We have some British computers.
We have a ZX-80.
You have to say ZX-Z, of course.
Of course.
We have a, what's the one on top of that called, we have Amstrad.
We have, among the exhibitors to our show, in fact, one of the exhibitors at our show
this weekend is a person from Montreal who's doing an entire big exhibit on European computers.
He has so many European computers, he did part one last year and part two this year.
One of our exhibitors a few years ago did a huge exhibit on Apple II clones and knockoffs
and had East German clones and Russian clones and that kind of thing.
Yeah.
That's what I'm interested in.
We'd love to have some more British stuff.
We'd love to have an Acorn or a BBC Micro or something, but we're working toward those.
Well, it sounds like you might also be working towards Vintage Computer Festival Europe.
Is that a possibility?
Already exists.
Oh, okay.
We have one in Italy a few weeks ago, and some of our partners put on VCF events in
Munich.
There was one in England a few years ago, we're looking to revive that.
I believe there's one in Switzerland by one of our partners, so we're looking to expand
actually quite a bit beyond that.
There are two or three places in particular that we're really eyeing and starting to plan,
but I'm not at liberty to say those yet.
Well, tell us more about the chapters here in the United States, the West and Northwest.
Okay, so we have Seattle, Silicon Valley, New Jersey, and then our partners have Chicago
and Atlanta.
We've been thinking about other logical places.
You can probably deduce some of the logical places, but those are the major ones right
now.
And they have other festivals or collections as well?
Yeah.
So, again, so the ones we own are East, West, Northwest, and Italy.
Other ones are partner events.
And we have basically, we own all future rights to new shows.
And I'm also, I'm very impressed with what you guys do as far as helping others out that
are researching, particularly television shows like Halt and Catch Fire.
I understand you were responsible for a lot of the hardware that they had in that program.
We were, especially in the first couple of seasons.
We did all the computers for The Americans, which is my favorite TV show, not just because
computers are in it, it's a great show.
We did an X-Men movie.
There's a Spike Lee movie coming out now called Black Klansman.
We did that.
We did a couple of major TV commercials.
We did some pilots that didn't take off.
We did a National Geographic TV special called, a docudrama called Gates vs. Jobs a couple
years ago.
That was a fun adventure.
So we do a lot of that.
And, you know, it's all for fundraising for the nonprofit.
And then we have, you know, at least here in the Mid-Atlantic chapter, we do a lot of
events for members.
For example, every month or two, we have repair workshops where we do, we believe in the teaching
of beneficial philosophy.
We do Maker Faire.
We do Hope, of course.
Can't wait for Hope.
You know, totally stoked about that again this year.
That's my own, probably my favorite event outside our own event.
In fact, a funny story with Hope, at the last Hope, I was demoing something that wasn't
quite finished, wasn't quite working yet, and it seemed like the attendees were more
impressed that I was making something than that I showed a finished product.
That's definitely the spirit of activity around Hope.
That is funny.
Well, Evan, we only have a minute left.
So tell us everything you can about how people can get involved with both the Vintage Computer
Festival and how they can attend this weekend.
Sure.
The best thing to do, I mean, all our tickets are closed because it's close to the event,
but plenty of tickets at the door we will not sell out.
So again, Victor, Charlie, Foxshot, Echo, Delta, or type Vintage Computer Federation
into Twitter or Facebook.
Learn all about us.
Come to the show.
I promise you'll have a blast.
And I can back that up.
You will have a blast.
It's three days long.
It's worth every minute that you spend there.
In fact, I'll have to drag you away.
And if you don't make it down to Wall, New Jersey, definitely come to the Hope Conference,
July 20th through 22nd.
Over the weekend, Evan and crew will be there, and you'll see all kinds of cool things there
as well.
Evan, best of luck.
Thank you for everything you've done, and please keep doing it.
Great.
Thanks for having us on.
See you guys in July.
All right.
Take care.
Again, Vintage Computer Festival East taking place this weekend in Wall, New Jersey.
vcfed.org, I believe, is the website to find out more information.
So by all means, go visit that and have a blast.
I guess that's going to just about do it for us here.
Don't forget to call 516-620-3602 or go to give2wbai.org.
Tell them your favorite show is off the hook and show your support for what we do.
And talk to your representatives about net neutrality and why you're into it.
That's right.
And talk to your parents, grandparents, everybody.
We're going to win this fight, and we'll win other fights, too.
See you next week.
Good night.
Bye.
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